She knew she should stop him, but she didn’t. His voice was like tearing back scabs. It hurt to hear, and it left her exposed and raw and painful to the touch, and the pain felt good. Worse, it felt right.
“I’m not saying she should be killed. That whole thing about how if she’s ever going back to prison, Amos is going to shoot her? I understand that he’s joking —”
“He’s not.”
“Okay, I’m pretending that he’s joking, but I’m not advocating killing her. I don’t want her to die. I don’t even want her locked up in inhumane, shitty prisons. But that’s not what we’re talking about. Shipping with someone means literally trusting them with your life all the time. And, okay, I was on the Canterbury, and we had some people there who were deeply, deeply sketchy. But even Byers only killed her husband. Clarissa Mao set out to destroy me in particular. Me. I just… I don’t… How does anyone think this is a good idea? Someone who does the things she did doesn’t just change.”
She took a deep breath, pulling air into her bruised lungs. They still gurgled a little, but she was on enough reflex inhibitors that she wasn’t coughing herself light-headed anymore. She didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to talk. She opened her eyes, sat up, her back against the headboard, her arms wrapped around her knees. Holden went quiet, feeling the weight of what was about to come. Naomi plucked at her hair, pulling it over her eyes like a veil, then almost angrily, she smoothed it back so her eyes were clear.
“So,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“Captain to XO?” he asked, carefully.
She shook her head. “Naomi to Jim.”
The dread that bloomed in his eyes hurt to see, but she’d also been expecting it. She felt its echo in her own chest. It was strange that after all she’d done – all the demons she’d faced and escaped – this should still be so hard. Holden’s hand terminal chimed, and he didn’t even look at the screen. The lines around his mouth deepened the way they did when he’d tasted something he didn’t like. His hands folded together, strong, controlled, calm. She remembered the first time they’d met, lifetimes ago back on the Canterbury. How he’d radiated charm and certainty and how much she’d hated it at first. How much she’d hated him for being too much like Marco. And then how much she’d come to love him for not being like him at all.
And now, she would break her rule of silence, and the thing they had between them would either survive or it wouldn’t. It was a terrible thought. Marco might still be able to empty her, and he wouldn’t even have to spend the effort of being aware of it. Existing was enough.
“I don’t,” Jim said, then stopped. He looked up at her through his eyebrows, like he was the one feeling guilty for it all. “We all have pasts. We all have secrets. When you took off, I felt… lost. Confused. Like part of my brain was gone. And now that you’re here, I am just profoundly happy to see you. This right here? It’s enough.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to know?”
“Oh lord, no. No, I’d pretty much cut off a toe. I’m pretty much made of ragingly deep curiosity and floating jealousy. But I can deal with those. I don’t have any more right to make you tell me anything you don’t want to than I ever did. If there’s anything you don’t want to say —”
“I don’t want to say any of this,” Naomi said. “But I want you to know. And so we have to get through this part, no?”
Jim shifted, pulling his legs up under him, kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face to hers. His hair was the color of coffee with just a little cream. His eyes were blue as deep water. As evening sky was supposed to be.
“Then we’ll get through it,” he said with a simple, boundless optimism that caught her by surprise and drew out laughter, even here.
“Well,” she said. “When I was in my middle teens, I was living with a woman we called Tia Margolis and burning through the engineering courses on the networks as fast as I could, and there were ships that came through dock. Belter ships. Hard-core.”
Jim nodded, and then – to her surprise – it was easy. In her mind, the idea of unpacking her past to Jim – to anyone – was a thing of anger and disgust and recriminations. Or worse, of pity. Jim, who for all his faults was sometimes capable of perfection, listened carefully and completely. She had been Marco Inaros’ lover. She’d gotten pregnant young. She’d been involved – at first without knowing it – in the sabotage of inner planets ships. She had a son named Filip who had been taken from her as a way to control her. She described the dark thoughts, and realized it was very nearly the first time she’d talked about them openly, without a veil of ironic humor. I tried to kill myself, but it didn’t work. Just saying the words out loud felt like being in a dream. Or waking up from one.
And then, somehow in the depth of her confession, the baring of her blighted soul that was always supposed to be a trauma and a terror, it was just her and Jim having a conversation. She’d found a way to get a message out to him during the battle, and he told her about getting it, and the conversation he’d been having with Monica Stuart, and why he’d felt betrayed by her. And then backtracked to how she’d been kidnapped, and then before that to her plan to use the protomolecule sample as a Ouija board to investigate the missing ships. And then they went back to the Chetzemoka and Marco’s fallback plan, which brought up the way he always nested one scheme inside another, and before she got back around to Cyn, Alex and Amos and Bobbie were back, their voices burbling over each other like birdsong. Jim closed the bedroom door against them and, when he came back, settled beside her, his back to the headboard too.
When she did talk about killing Cyn during her jump, Jim took her hand. They were silent for a moment while she examined her grief. It was real, and it was deep, but it was also complicated with anger at her old friend and captor. She hadn’t let herself be aware of that at the time, but looking back, her whole stretch on the Pella seemed like an exercise in retracting into herself. Except when she’d defied Marco. She remembered saying that Jim was all the things he only pretended to be, wondered whether she should tell that part of the story, and then did. Jim looked horrified and then laughed. They lost track of their stories and spent ten minutes getting the timeline back: the Chetzemoka left the Pella after Jim and Fred had already departed from Tycho, or before? He’d told Alex to go investigate the Pau Kant before the rocks dropped on Earth? Oh right. Okay. She got it now.
They got sleepy together, her arm curled in his. The pauses grew longer, and softer. She thought Oh, we should really talk about Amos and Clarissa Mao, but then she was dreaming that she was on a ship that was burning at a full g for everyone else while she was on the float. All the other people in the crew, pressed to the deck while she moved through the air, reaching the tools and ducts they couldn’t get to. In the dream, Alex was explaining that it was because she had so much built-up inertia that the rest of them would take a while catching up. In context, it seemed to make sense.
She woke up. She didn’t know how much later it was, but there were no more voices from the main room. Jim was curled on his side, his back against her. His breath was deep and slow. She stretched slowly, careful not to disturb him. The aches in her muscles and skin and joints felt a little better, and there was a warmth in her chest. A looseness.
For years, she’d kept her secrets. Held them like she was keeping the pin in a hand grenade. The fear and the shame and the guilt had built up without her even noticing. The things she had done wrong – and there were so many – had grown in power. Not having them gnawing at her ribs from the inside felt strange. Empty, in a way, but a peaceful kind of empty.
Not that she was suddenly made of light and happiness. Cyn was still dead because of her. Filip was still abandoned. Abandoned again. Marco was still as much a pool of anger and hatred. Nothing about that had changed, and everything had. An old picture made into something new by replacing the frame. Jim shifted in his sleep. The thin, dark hairs on the back of his neck had a couple paler ones among them. The f
irst touches of gray.
Something had changed between them. Not just during her sabbatical in hell, but now that she was back from her own personal underworld. She wasn’t sure exactly who they were to each other, she and Jim, except that things would be different now. Because she was different, and her changing wasn’t going to break him. He wouldn’t try to make her stay the Naomi he’d imagined.
Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better.
She got out of bed slowly, shuffling to the little desk in the corner of the room. Their hand terminals were there, and the little bottle of Jim’s anticancer drugs, since he wasn’t on the Roci. She reached for her terminal, paused, and picked up his. She should ask first, but he was asleep, and she didn’t want to wake him, and she didn’t think he’d mind.
Monica Stuart’s footage of the Rabia Balkhi passing through the ring gate was unexceptional. Nothing in it seemed at all strange, except for the story around it. What had Marco done with it, she wondered. Why had he started his piracy so long before the actual coup that would permit it to go large-scale? Just the effort of doctoring all the logs from Medina would be a risk he didn’t need to take. Maybe it was something to do with the system the Balkhi was heading into…?
She shifted to her own terminal, connecting to the Roci’s system and putting out a series of simple pattern matching requests. It wasn’t hard to do. Most of the information Stuart had been working with was public record. And optical telescopes around the system had been trained on the Free Navy since the moment Marco had started his assault on the Martian convoy. The list of systems where ships had gone missing wasn’t long, but the pattern in it wasn’t obvious either. She tried to remember if anyone on the Pella had talked about any of them: Tasnim, Jerusalem, New Kashmir. Of course, the naming conventions were also a mess. New Kashmir also got called Sandalphon, High Texas, and LM-422. She pulled up alternate names for the other systems. Now that Jim had learned the worst of her past, she was almost eager to start the debriefing with Avasarala’s team, and if there was some clue she could bring from her time on the Pella…
She scowled. Ran the matching schema again with different tolerances. Behind her, Jim yawned. When he sat up, the sheets made a hushing sound. The Roci came back with a list of possibles, and she spooled through them. The Ankara Slough was an approximate match for the Rabia Balkhi, but looking through the differences she saw the drive signatures were wrong. It would have cost less to make a new ship than to swap a whole drive complex out of an existing one. In the front room, Alex said something and Amos answered. And then – to her brief surprise – Bobbie. Jim’s hand touched her shoulder.
“Hey. You all right?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said. “Fine.”
“How long have you been up?”
She checked the time and groaned. “Three and a half hours.”
“Breakfast?”
“God, yes.”
Her back protested when she stood, but only a little. Her mind felt focused and alive and wholly her own for the first time in weeks. Maybe since the first, toxic message from Marcos had come in. She wasn’t at war with herself, and it felt good. But…
Jim’s hair was in wild disarray, but he looked handsome in it. She took his arm. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” she said.
“Would coffee improve whatever it is?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” she said.
In the main room of the suite, Amos and Bobbie were talking about methods of unpowered travel, each of them subtly outdoing the other and both clearly aware of it and having fun. Alex grinned to her and Jim when they sat at the breakfast bar, and then poured them both demitasses of slow-pouring espresso with thick brown crème at the top. Naomi sipped, enjoying the heat and the rich complexity hidden inside the bitterness.
“You’re looking better,” Alex said.
“Feeling better. Thanks. Bobbie, the missing ships you were looking for. They were all MCRN, right? Navy?”
“Ships. Weapons. Supplies. The whole thing,” Bobbie said. “I guess we know what happened to them now.”
“No colony ships, though?”
The big woman frowned. “I wasn’t looking for any.”
“What’s up?” Jim asked.
Naomi swirled the espresso in her little bone-colored cup, watching the whorls form and vanish in the low gravity. “The missing ships come in two flavors. Military vessels from Mars that the Free Navy have now, and then colony ships that went missing on their way out to new systems. And I make sixty, maybe seventy percent matches with the Free Navy ships to old military records. I can’t find one match with the missing colony ships. I can’t see a pattern in what systems they were going to or what they were carrying. And I don’t know what hijacking them could have gained for Marco.”
Amos made a low grunting sound in the back of his throat.
“Yeah,” Naomi said, as if the sound had been words. “Something in the ring gates is eating ships.”
Epilogue: Sauveterre
“I have a tracking number,” the captain of the little freight ship said for what had to be the sixth or seventh time. “I have landing papers and a tracking number straight from Amatix Pharmaceuticals. I know the shipment arrived on Medina six months ago. I have a tracking number.”
Sauveterre sipped smoked tea from a bulb as he listened. He would have preferred whiskey from a glass, but he was on duty and the Barkeith was on the float. The first did for the whiskey, the second for the glass. Granted, the captain’s office was private and he could have done whatever he pleased. And, he supposed, he did. Keeping to his duty was a more pleasing thing for him than whiskey, which was as it should be.
“Sabez you got a tracking number, Toreador,” the voice from Medina Station said. “Amatix, though? Esa es Earth-based. No Earth-based companies on Medina.”
The Barkeith was a Donnager-class battleship. A small city in space, run with machined precision and capable of turning not only the little freighter but Medina Station to particles smaller than grains of sand. But it and the rest of Duarte’s fleet were waiting for permission from traffic control on Medina to proceed through the next ring gate and begin the second, stranger leg of their journey. It was an overabundance of etiquette on the fleet’s part, but there were reasons for that. Not the least being the general reluctance to use heavy weapons too near the alien station that hung inert in the vast non-space between the rings. They weren’t ready for that to awaken again. Not yet.
A light knock came at the door. Sauveterre straightened his tunic. “Come.” Lieutenant Babbage opened the door, bracing with a handhold on its frame. She looked anxious as she saluted. Sauveterre let her hold the position for a moment before answering her salute and allowing her to enter.
“I have been en route for ten months!” the captain of the Toreador shouted. “If the colony doesn’t get this shipment, they’re fucked.”
“Have you been listening to this?” Sauveterre asked, nodding toward the speakers.
“No, sir,” Babbage said. Her skin was ashen under the brown. Her lips pressed thin.
“Üzgün, Toreador,” Medina Station said. “You need to dock for medical, wir koennen —”
“I don’t need to dock for medical! I need my fucking supplies! I have a tracking number that puts them on your station, and I will not —”
Sauveterre cut them off and took another sip of tea. “They’ve been going more or less like that for the better part of an hour. It’s embarrassing on their behalf.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know why I wanted you to hear it?”
She swallowed her fear, which was good, and her voice didn’t tremble when she spoke, which was better. “To demonstrate what happens when there is a breakdown in discipline, sir.”
“The end point of it, anyway. Yes. I’ve heard you violated dress code. Is that true?”
“It was a bracelet, sir. It belonged to my mother, and I thought…” He
r voice trailed off. “Yes, sir. That report is true, sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I appreciate your candor.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
Sauveterre smiled. “Granted.”
“With respect, sir, the dress code was MCRN regulation. If we are going to enumerate transgressions against code, there are some larger ones that might also be worthy of examination. Sir.”
“You mean like being here at all.”
Her expression was hard. She’d overplayed her hand, and she knew it. It happened. Embarrassment and the childish need to stamp her feet and say it wasn’t fair. He wouldn’t have gone there in her place. But since it was on the table, it was on the table. No way but forward.
“We are in a time of flux, that’s true. With the elected government failing its obligations, Admiral Duarte has taken authority and responsibility for the fleet on himself. I, following the chain of command, am carrying out his orders. You, also following the chain of command, are expected to follow mine. This is an independent initiative of the fleet. It’s not a free-for-all.”
“Sir,” she said. She meant Yes, sir, but she hadn’t said the yes part.
“Do you know what happens if I write you up for your failure to follow fleet discipline?”
“I could be demoted, sir.”
“You could. If things continued, you could be drummed out. Removed from duty. Dishonorably discharged. Not over this, of course. This is small, but if it became large. You understand?”
“I do, sir.”
“If you were discharged, what do you think would happen?”
She looked at him, confused. He gestured with his free hand, a sweep that gave her permission to speak.